In Our Time - Modernist Utopias

Episode Date: March 11, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mad, bad world of modern utopias. "I want to gather together about twenty souls," wrote D H Lawrence in 1915, "and sail away from this world of war and squalor and find a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go, and some real decency". Utopias were in the air in the first decades of the 20th century and the literature of the period abounds with worlds of imagined escape, feminist utopias, technological nightmares and rich imaginings of the world as it could or should become. Many of the societies that writers like H G Wells created were meant seriously, as signposts to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weak are eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate.What was it about that era that brought forward so many imagined futures? How did utopias become the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984, and why are writers so much less likely to create a Utopia now?With John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Oxford University and editor of The Faber Book of Utopias; Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Laura Marcus, Professor of English, University of Sussex.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. I want to gather together about 20 souls, wrote The Edge Florence in 1915, and sail away from this world of war and squalor

and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go and some real decency. Utopias were in the air as the 19th swung into the 20th century, and the literature of the period abounds with worlds of imagined escape, feminist utopias, technological nightmares, and rich imaginings of the world as it could or should become. Many of the societies that writers like HG Wells created

were meant seriously, a signpost to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weaker eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate. What was it about that era that brought forward? so many imagined futures. How did utopias become the dystopias of brave new world in 1984? And why our writer is so much less likely to create a utopia now. With me to discuss modern utopias is John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University,

and editor of the Faber Book of Utopias. Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and Laura Marcus, Professor of English at the University of Sussex. John Carey, can you give us an overview of the kinds of Utopia that were written about at the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century? Yes, I think there was a change between the late 19th and the early 20th century. And I think you could sum it up by saying that late 19th century utopias are optimistic, early 20th century ones pessimistic,

and that late 19th century ones are by and large egalitarian, aiming for equality, and early 20th century. are exclusive, the opposite of egalitarian. And you could take marks, I think, writing in the critique of the Goethe Program, saying that his ideal for utopia is from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. It seems a good ideal. And that was taken up by, right at the end of the 19th century,

by Edward Bellamy, American utopian in looking backward, who planned a state where, as in, what you've just quoted him, D.H. Lawrence, there would be no money. Everyone would have a credit card, which entitled him or her to an absolutely equal share of the national surplus. Everyone, whether they were fit, unfit, employable, unemployable, everyone. It was absolute equality. You joined an industrial army at the age of 21. You retired at 45 when you got the vote. You only got the vote after you had worked for it. and in the industrial army you were of course under military law and you were allocated to jobs and you kept the state going.

Now that all changes, that idea of absolute equality changes as I see it with HG Wells. I'm not saying he changed but he represented a great change and he was worried by two things that don't seem to worry the 19th century utopians. One was overpopulation and the other which went along with it was the ruin of the planet. He was the first person to be worried about ecology

the first person to see that we were wiping out the habitats of other species and other species themselves. So what he wanted was greatly to reduce the population, particularly other races. And in a work called Anticipations in 2011, in 2001, he says that we must actually, that what he calls, I mean, it's hair-raising stuff, the black and brown and yellow and dirty white races must go. It's their destiny to die out. Steve Conner, what are the main currents in society that are fueling these thoughts of the future? Are we talking about industry, technology? I mean, what we think of as the Industrial Revolution is really an early to mid-Victorian phenomenon

in the advanced countries like Britain and following them in France. And what you're beginning to see in the 1890s and what is beginning to be understood self-consciously in the 1890s, I think, is a second wave of that. It's as it were a kind of natural. of all of the really very extraordinary and in some ways catastrophic changes that have been brought about by industrialisation, the growth of enormous cities, the move away from primarily kind of agricultural production. And the appearance of mass society.

Mass society was as it were a kind of offshoot of industrialism. By the 1890s, mass society had to be thought about. and masses, large numbers of people, began to be thought of, began to be understood as more than just aggregates of, you know, lots of individuals stuck together. The notion of a kind of mass will, the sense that there was a sort of a mass psychology

is very much an 1890s notion. Gustav Le Bonn, writing in 1895, wrote the first book really on crowds as a kind of phenomenon. So society, as it were, begins to be conscious of it. But what do things like the invention of electricity and so what do they bring to the table? This too is part of a new kind of way, of a new sort of technology. I mean, technologies in the middle of the 19th century had fundamentally been mechanical or kinetic. They augmented the arm or the leg.

They made things go faster or they enabled you to do things that you weren't strong enough to do individually. but by the 1880s already, technologies are beginning to become sensory technologies, intimate, sort of soft machines of the kind that we're really very familiar with today. Telephones, even things like the light bulb, actually, which in its way gave birth to a number of different utopias. Gabriel Tard's underground man, for example, is all about a world that isn't possible unless you have artificial lighting. And this produces a sense, as it were, that somehow, has got inside human beings. And I think this belongs to the utopian impulse that involves newly, I think, from the 1890s onwards

the problem and the challenge, not just of remaking the world, but of remaking people. Can I take up something that John Kerry said and ask you, the way that ideology goes into it, because John Kerry quoted Marx, that line now. How do you see ideology, as it were, going over into, bleeding into, I was about to say, It's a rotten fryer, anyway, utopia.

Yes. It's because ideology, a word that's been around since the end of the 18th century, to mean something really quite kind of ordinary systems of belief, ideology begins to become part of this effort to understand human beings as they behave collectively, which turns out to be very different from how they behave just as individuals. And it begins to become part of this prospect of pre-examined, of producing belief, producing beliefs and feelings.

I think before then beliefs and feelings were sort of byproducts. They were other kind of accidental things. But ideology as something, as it were, that one has a responsibility to manufacture and monitor, that it's part of the entire picture. It belongs to this period. Laura Marcus, I think every person mentioned so far by John and by Steve has been a man.

And yet, as you point out, in what I've read of yours. A great deal of women were writing and they were writing about feminism, about the place of women, the idea was that the future, already in the late 19th century, that the future belonged to women and so on. So can you bring that to bear? Yes, I mean, I think it's important to note that any utopia male or female

is going to have to make the woman question, as it was called, in the mid-19th century, absolutely central questions of reproduction of maternity of relations between the sexes, so it's not just, as it were, women, utopialists, who are bringing that in. and Engels indeed referred to the utopian propensity in forming the woman question. But it's certainly true that when we get to the end of the 19th century,

it's the women writers, the new women writers of the 1890s, who I think even if they're not producing what we might think of as official utopias, are writing in a very utopian fashion, using dreams and allegories. And the Marxist theorist Antsblok called the tense of utopia the not yet. And that seems to be very much the tense of women's writing.

at this period the sense that, and very often it's a tragic sense that women's aspirations and desires and dreams are ahead of the times, ahead of what society is prepared to allow them. So writers like Olive Shrine or particularly Oliver, perhaps, but George Edgerton are well. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, slightly different figure. Her official utopia, as it were, her land written in 1915

is a very confident representation of an all-women utopia. Can you tell listeners a bit about, I mean, it was new to me that. It's written in 1915 called Herland. It couldn't be a sort of stronger blunter on the nose title. That's sort of title. I'd rather like it. Can you just tell people about that? Yes, indeed.

Not to sort of locate it, which would be useful. Yes, it was serial. It was not published actually until the kind of way of late 20th century feminism, but it was in book form. It was serialized in her own feminist journal in 1915. And it tells the story of three young male adventurers. One is a sociologist called Van Dyke. Jennings, who discover a land composed entirely of women who two thousand years ago had

discovered the miracle of Parthenogenesis. So it's an all-female community producing only girls and only daughters. And the standoff, as a word in the book, is having to explain to the men how an all-female community works. And the women have to understand how it is that a society which has both sexes or genders works. And the society that Gilman portrays is entire. a utopia and it is without war, without violence. And she did write a sequel, which is a bisexual community. So it's almost as if the utopia of women will ultimately be transcended by a world in which men and women can live together. We've kept one word out of this so far.

We discussed this beforehand, and in order to keep it all the moment out, because it is a massive word that came into this whole movement among many writers, and that the word is eugenics. Most of the people that I, we have mentioned, many of the people, brought that in. I'm just going to kick it off with one quotation from H.G. Wells. People of the Abyss, as he called, must be phased out. The nation that, quote, most resolutely picks over, educates, sterilises, exports, or poisons its people of the abyss will gain ascendancy. Right, Steve Conner, can I take that on?

Well, I mean, I was thinking as we were talking about her. land about the number of utopias that are radically subtractive. That, you know, they involve deciding what it is that needs to be removed and taken out of the picture. And this seems to belong, I think, to a moment that we think is different from our moment, but we're really completely continuous with it. And I think this is something that characterizes the 20th century, more than any other 20th century, more than any other century, and is brutal and dangerous and remains, and that is the cult of life.

Now, who isn't on the side of life? But when you look at the people who have been on the side of life, they're a pretty nasty crew. And the people who are on the side of life are always so murderous. Now, it's difficult, I mean, it seems very obvious to us that somebody like Wells,

or, of course, you know, other rank eugenicists like Hitler, and the Nazis are clearly not like us, but then there's a whole bunch of people who seem not like them who are also on the side of this extraordinary, undefined thing called life. And the only thing that you can say about life is that, well, in this century, life has been defined as the ultimate value. So the question of what you've got to do in a utopia is not to get rid of wickedness or evil,

but to get rid of ugliness. because ugliness is not life. I mean, as John Kerry has written, the thing about the masses is there's no problem with really fantasies of exterminating them because in a sense they're already dead. Well, we can take that a bit further out. This is a very important point. Let's go to Laura here.

Behind all this is Darwin, and behind all this is the idea of the survival of the fittest, which was turned into, well, that means that we should adopt this as human species. Look what happens to horses. that they survive effects. How are we any real different? We should go for that. And Aldouss like he said,

we should get rid of all half-wits and idiots. We've read what H.G. Wells said, Gaunt is saying, Marys Stopes, great birth control, but she also wants to get, she could change the population in a generation, were she given total power? She would just sterilise and so on. It really, and that's being fed

by an interpretation, a misinterpretation, of Darwinism. I'm sure that's true, yes, some of the social Darwinists. So I think Darwin actually referred to the eugenic program as itself a utopia, and I don't think he meant that favorably. So it's Galton we perhaps have to look to who did indeed coin the term eugenics, eugenie's good in stock and the science of breeding for the improvement, so-called improvement of the race.

And I think what's important to recognize that it is a spectrum with birth control at the one end and compulsory sterilization at the other end. and many of the figures we're talking about move freely between those. Galton did not want to get mixed up with the birth control question. It mudded the waters for him. But perhaps I could say something about Mary Stokes because she is a great feminist campaigner, and I think she would be recognised as that.

But she was also fantastically committed eugenicist and in favour of birth control as positive eugenics. And the idea being that you would get the good middle classes to reproduce and you would get the bad indigent, poor, the hopeless, the unfit that were to stop. Sterilised? She did talk about, yeah, she was for compulsory sterilisation. And I think the extent of her commitment is revealed when she disinherited her only child, her son, when he married a woman who had what Mary Stopes called an inherited physical defect,

which was that she was short-sighted, and would sully her excellent stock by people. producing children who might have to wear what Mary Stope called goggles. So I think this was not in, I mean, I think we have to recognize, as I say, the extent of her commitment to this particular project. And I think it's also true that some of the writers we think of as strongly feminist writers, some of the new women writers, like Sarah Grand or George Edgerton, were also thinking about the importance for them of women were as race regenerators.

You made your claims for feminism because women were indeed the mothers of the race. They were breeding for empire, and you needed fitness for that cause. I think what Laura says is very interesting and important, because often eugenics is thought of nowadays in purely negative terms, but when Laura points out how well-intentioned a lot of eugenicists were, I like very much Steve's phrase radically subtractive. Actually, I think all utopias have been radically subtractive. Plato was.

In Plato's utopia, defective children were killed at birth. Well, you can't get much more radically subtracted than that. We want a race, which is perfect. And I think that the future of eugenics, I think it has a future. And in the anthology I did, I included a piece by Liam Silver, who is a professor at Princeton, and who predicts that with synthetic genes, the possibility of introducing synthetic genes,

you will be able to eliminate all diseases. I mean, you will be able to produce children who are designer babies, as it's called, who will be the future crack businessmen, star athletes and so on. No one will be able to compete with them. Of course, it will cost money. So what you'll get, he predicts, are two human races. You'll have the gene enriched and you'll have the naturals who are the poor. And eventually, he thinks, there will be no possibility of their interbreeding.

It would be like interbeating with chimpanzee for a geninwitch to mate with a natural. Laura, can I bring you in here to discuss the idea that planning a society at being able to organise people and slot them into places like he did with industrial workforce and so on and so. It was almost a Newtonian principle, curiously enough, when Einstein was coming in the Newtonian principle of organizing everything, making everything work like clockwork. that became an idea which inhabited thinkers at the time. Absolutely, yes, and I think we haven't, well, we've touched on the question of the machine,

but this really perhaps is taking us into the dystopic realm, isn't it, and the sense that it's the planned society, whether it's the Fordism of Brave New World or the Henry Ford, yes, yes, absolutely, or Taylor, the time-and-motion study man, who's at the heart of Zambiatins, we, that sense of a society controlled and co-eastern, and planned in that way becomes the stuff of the dystopia. I think it's AGP Taylor who talks about planning as the key word of the 1930s, and he says that the standard was utopia, so in the sense that the planned society and the utopian society

are seen as one and the same at this time. And I think we get into complex territory here. I mean, perhaps we could move on to thinking about Huxley and Brave New World, because unlike in 1984, written later, I think whatever we feel the target of 1984 is we never have any doubt that this really is a profound dystopia, the boot on the face. Whereas I think Huxley's text is much more ambiguous. In Brave New World. In Brave New World.

The question of whether this is a dystopia or utopia, a satire, what he's given us, if we think of the relationship between utopia and dystopia as one of plenitude versus scarcity, as Steve was suggesting, well, obviously what Huxley is. given us is a dystopia of happiness, a dystopia of plenitude. Well, let's talk about Huxley and Brave New Orleans. I would like to sort of include two or three questions I'll have gone to ask on the way there, but perhaps we can include them now. And if I can just switch to John Kerry for a second and then come back to you. There was this, the utopian idea, the modern idea, elides into the modernist idea,

that a utopia is a utopia of the mind, and that is for a small number of people, the 800 people who read T.S. Eliot's magazine, not the tens of thousands who read H.G.WRs and go to the cinema to Cies, films adapted and so forth. Those two seem to come together. And Hux is a very good example, sort of of both of them, isn't he, really? Yes, I think Huxley is.

I mean, he's very different, Norrisis, than Orwell. And he's different in that way that I think that Orwell has not got a notion of an intellectual elite. If he has, he doesn't like it much. Huxley thinks it is the most important thing and that to love classical music and read Shakespeare and so on are what matters and if you're not, if you don't do that, you're not quite human and where he, I'm sure that Law is right that he's ambivalent,

but where he's ambivalent is over things like soft drugs, for example, hallucinogenic drugs, which eventually he comes round to when he writes Ireland, it's a good thing to take them in Brave New World, it's not a good thing to take them, but what does not change is that the educated mind is what matters. Orwell is much more worried about, more uncertain about that, after all he says, that the future lies with the proles,

with the uneducated. But to come back to Brave New World with Laura Wynne, that has, in a sense it seems to me, to both utopia and dystopia, he's putting both things out, and is including what John Carrey says, included the idea. So can you explore that a bit more?

Yes, I mean, I think what's interesting, obviously Huxley had visited America, Hollywood, in the 1920s. And in some ways what he's giving us is obviously his version of modern America but that might take us back

to the whole history of utopias from the kind of 16th century onwards in the sense that America, the brave new world, the new world is always at some, at the heart, it's very often at the heart

of these imaginings. So that the, you know, the dystopia utopia of brave new world is precisely the world of jazz, of the philies, you know, the kind of super censor

around. kind of cinema of popular culture of mass culture, which had both horrified him and, I think, in some ways he'd found rather seductive. But he does talk about the kind of dystopia of the good time, capital G, capital T. And that's partly what we're getting, I think, in Brave New World. So can we take that on a bit, Zip? Why is, in the sense, Aldous Hux is talking about this is the way to achieve happiness. You have three different segments of society.

You drill them into it. You give them feelies. and they have happiness. Isn't it terrible, sort of? Right. Now, can you take that off? Absolutely. I grew up assuming that George Orwells

was the more prescient and more powerful. George Orwells, yes, 1984, was the more important because it dealt with important and obvious things that came out of the Second World War and that was still current, you know, during the period of the Cold War. And it was all about power

and very patent kinds of suffering and injustice, a boot stamping down on a human, face forever. That's the vision of the future. It now seems to me that Aldous Huxley was much more prescient, that Aldous Huxley, what you have in Orwell is a kind of, you have the horror of patent injustice that no one can recognize, except all of its readers. What you have in Huxley is the horror of not being able to tell whether or not your happiness is just. It's the horror precisely of happiness. And what is missing from the world of Brave New World

is precisely darkness and suffering and pain. And I think there is a curious sense in which he anticipates the movement that Daniel Bell, a cultural sociologist, referred to back in the 1970s, where he pointed to a sort of a consumer society, a kind of generalization of the sensory, aesthetic utopias that were spoken of by writers like, or evoked by writers like Virginia Wolf, in a sense, D.H. Lawrence and almost, in a sense, too, James Joyce. So they

become kind of generalized. And the internet is almost like a kind of a manifestation of that, that everyone can have the gratification that they want all the time. There are people listening to this program, I said, if I could have all the gratification I want all the time, it wouldn't be a bad deal. Yes, but Julian Barnes is on to this. Julian Barnes, in the last chapter of his history of the world in ten and a half chapters, has a Leicester City supporter, as I think perhaps Julian Barnes is, who goes to heaven, and Leicester City, you know, of course he can have anything he wants, and Leicester City win the FA Cup every year, 15 or 20-0,

and then he realizes that's not as good as them winning it just in the last minute, and then he realizes it's not as good as them just losing it, at which point he can go to hell like everybody else. I think Steve's quite right. And what lies behind Huxley, there is ambivalence over this material consumerist paradise. And as you say, Melvin, a lot of people would opt for that. What lies behind it in Huxley is the ideal of austerity, as I take it,

a very Christian ideal. I was going to come to that. Sorry, after you. Well, no, no. I mean, and I think that is one of the great, I think that's one of the great, I was going to say contrast with Orwell, because it's easy to say with Orwell, on the contrary, shortage, which is everywhere in 984 is a bad thing. The cigarettes are terrible, the coffee's undrinkable and so on. But actually, I think they're both the same.

I mean, I think Orwell also love the austere life. After all, what did he do at the end of his life, agapees? A good old man. Try and grow his own vegetables with his enormous unsuccess, you know. So they both. And I think, as a matter of fact, I think austerity is exactly the idea. that we need nowadays, and the jolly world going to have. Of course, I mean, as the planet gets poorer and the population's bigger,

there'll be a lot more austerity around. I think we'd better think of it as a virtue. Did they very, very broadly and crudely in a way, but did Nazism destroy all ideas of utopia or just an idea of one sort of utopia? Good heavens, no. Nazism was a utopia, of course. Yeah, but by being a utopia, it destroyed the attractive utopian.

Oh, I destroyed the attractiveness of utopias. I see, I think it did some harm. but I don't think the utopian idea is going to die because of that. It's still here. And I'm interested by your phrase, Melvin, the human condition. Because when you say the human condition, you and I think of some particular thing, like humans as we are now, the interesting about utopias is they get over all that.

It may be that if we came back in a thousand years' time, we would not recognize as human the beings that are here because utopias realize that you can change people and change society and change what you understand by humanity. So the sort of stuff Steve has been saying, which is quite right, and you say that suffering is important to being human. If you said that to humans in a thousand years, what do you mean?

It's like saying, unless you've had the plague, bubonic plague is very important by being human. We think it's crazy to say such a thing. And if these gene-enriched beings that silver predicates are happening, well, they won't be able to understand us at all, not just the language, but the mindset. It'll be human, but it'll be quite different. different from us. I think what utopias have done, what the attempt to realize utopias, not just

in Nazi Germany but in Soviet Russia and elsewhere too have done, is in a sense contaminated imagination because these were, of course, you know, exercises in planning, but they were also, in a sense, monstrously imaginative projects, a sense that you could precisely imagine and then put in place an utterly different kind of creature. And we sort of of feel, I think, that imagination is now kind of a danger and that perhaps what we need to do is to find ways of having less grandiose visions for ourselves. And that's a rather difficult thing to do

because, I mean, always in history before, the problem has been getting more control over yourself and over your future, resting control from nature. Thank you very much to Laura Marcus, John Kerry and Steve Connor, next week I'll be discussing Dark Energy with Roger Penrose, Martin Rees and Carolyn Crawford, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.